This article by the art critic Eduardo Márceles Daconte was published in the Sunday Magazine of the Bogotá daily newspaper El Espectador. The writer provides a brief account of the activities of the group El Sindicato, which emerged in Barranquilla in the years 1976−78. He goes on to report the award given to the work Alacena con zapatos (1978) at the XXVII Salón Nacional (1978). In the text, the writer discusses the relationship established between the artwork of said group and its immediate context. As he sees it, the Escuela de Bellas Artes at the Universidad del Atlántico was very important to the formation of said collective in the heart of the coastal city, Barranquilla. Márceles Daconte refers to the theater organization that managed the group as well as the effectiveness of its approaches as compared with the failure of the individual projects of other artists during that time. The writer highlights the impact of El Sindicato on the practice of art in Barranquilla.

The importance of this article by the writer Eduardo Márceles Daconte (b. 1942), entitled “El arte conceptual se toma el Salón Nacional”, is in its reference to the theater organization that managed the work of the group El Sindicato. This translated into an insistence that the individuality of each artist be merged into a collective artwork in which the hand of each individual artist was invisible. It was also important as a record of the prize awarded at the XXVII Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales (1978) by a jury that reflected the international art world. Jury members were Waldo Rasmussen, director of the International Program at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Aracy Amaral, director of the Pinacoteca del Estado de São Paulo; and the Colombian artist Santiago Cárdenas. The installation proposed, Alacena con zapatos, had a great impact on the public in attendance.

Under the slogan “Le cambiamos su gusto, con mucho gusto” [It will be our pleasure to change your taste], this collective managed to catch the attention of the other artists, gallery owners and art critics in the city of Barranquilla. The five artists met at the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the Universidad del Atlántico (in this Caribbean port), where they were all students, with the exception of Aníbal Tobón, director of the theater group at the time.

El Sindicato was a collective of artists based in Barranquilla made up of the theater director and journalist Aníbal Tobón (b. 1947), and the artists Efraín Arrieta (1942−2006), Ramiro Gómez (b. 1949), Carlos Restrepo (b. 1950) and Alberto del Castillo (b. 1948). The group held more than twenty exhibitions between 1976 and 1978, most of them in the workshop/site based in the working-class neighborhood of Barranquilla called Barrio Abajo. At the time, their actions stirred up controversy in the local press. Later, after the collective showed its work at the XXVII Salón Nacional, reviews of their work began to appear in the national press. The group fell apart just months after they were awarded the prize for their work Alacena con zapatos (1978), and each of the artists went off on his own visual-arts path.